


passion, patience, pati

by uglowian



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Holiday Fic Exchange, Holidays, Light Angst, Longing, M/M, New Year's Eve, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: you must be all alone to confront the things you want





	passion, patience, pati

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fixme_in_fortyfive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fixme_in_fortyfive/gifts).



> title in reference to a few lines from a book that i can't quote because it'll probably give away the author of this work. but if you really want to know, ask in the comments. 
> 
> many thanks to my two lovely betas/cheerleaders. you make making things a joy. <3

New Year's Eve comes on the teeth of a winter so cold that Lake Michigan foams in a crust of ice on the shore. Patrick's seen it—not this year, but before, as a kid. Glassy and grey, all down the gritty shoreline, until the snow piles up on it and then it's just white. He remembers, just two years ago, kicking his way down the beach with Pete and throwing rocks to the water. Cheering when they heard the ice crack and the water slurp.

This year, he's just at Pete's parents' house, feeling a little out of place. He always feels weird when they leave the house to Pete for a party, but apparently they trust his friends, even if they shouldn't. Or maybe they just like that Pete has something to do; maybe they just want to make sure—

Well. Just to make sure.

Patrick gets it.

And the house is nice, anyway, and Pete's mom left them with _actual_ champagne instead of the bottom-shelf Andre they would have bought themselves. It was sweet of her. So he holds small court in the corner of the living room, still partly preoccupied with the promise everyone made not to actually mess the house up too badly. It's not that there's even much apparent danger of that happening. He's just stuck in the weird liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, still waiting for the real grown-ups to walk in and reprimand someone for something.

Swearing too much; making a mess.

No grown-ups, real or otherwise, materialize. Joe bounces at his side, caught up in the conversation. Someone keeps flipping between three different stations, all hosting different Times Square acts while the clock ticks towards midnight.

Pete's voice drifts to them from the kitchen—Patrick hears it. Or, he hears that weird, giddy laugh Pete does when he's not quite instigating a fight. Someone snaps back at him, and Patrick follows the rhythm of this conversation that he can't quite hear.

Hillary.

Her inflection of speech matches Pete's to a degree that's almost creepy, sometimes.

The living room's conversation eddies around him. _2005—the year of breakout stardom?_. Some guy that Patrick doesn't really know. Jeremy? Whatever. Joe laughs, but it's a little derisive and a little self-deprecating as laughs go. _Yeah you know. Check us out, we're hot on the Z-list._

The kitchen chatter breaks. Pete appears in the living room, ten paces ahead of Hillary. Before she can catch up with him—and before Patrick can protest with a 'what the hell?'—he shoulders past Jeremy and grabs Patrick's wrist.

"Hillary says I get proprietary rights to her makeup til she gets back," he announces, dragging Patrick for the foyer.

"I did _not_ —"

Hillary catches up with them at the foot of the stairs, just as Patrick twists free.

"Can I just check in with…what? Is going on?"

"Pete won't give me my car keys, and I'm going to be late, asshole."

Pete jingles the keyring around his finger. "All you have to do is say yes."

"Get fucked."

"C'mon, Hil, I'm not gonna break anything."

Hillary glances between them, her upper lip curling. "Fine. But if you fuck my shit up I'm keying your car."

Patrick's pretty sure she means Pete's car, not his. Pete just tosses her the keys and their silvery sound sparkles.

"Happy New Year."

Hillary snatches the ring out of midair, rolls her eyes, and goes, all in one smooth turn of the heel. Patrick watches Pete bite his lip at her back.

"What the hell?"

It feels like an appropriate question, but Pete just shrugs.

"I told her she had to share her eye glitter."

"Her _eye glitter_?"

"Like, eyeliner with sparkles. Pull your shit together, Trick, c'mon."

Patrick feels like he could follow Hillary's example, roll his eyes, and walk away. He doesn't though. For whatever stupid reason. It's winter, and it's cold out, and the conversation out in the living room was making him feel strange, maybe. Pete's fingers find his, tugging again—the stairs.

"Where are we going?" Patrick sighs.

"To do a makeover."

"A—what?"

Pete's fingers curl a little firmer over his own. It's not very well lit by the steps. The warm nimbus of the living room only casts a weak spell here. Everything else is the work of the Christmas lights that no one's taken down yet, patterning their way up the balustrade.

It's the kind of thing that makes Patrick think of underwater kingdoms. When he was little, he used to hold his breath and sit at the bottom of the pool just to watch how the light came down through the water in undulating shafts.

Now it just splashes in a dazzle on the fringes of Pete's hair.

"A makeover, c'mon." Pete tugs again.

"Dude, you don't need me to help you put on your sister's eyeliner."

"No, Trick, you."

"Me, _what_ —let me go, jackass."

Pete's big, bright smile. "Haven't you ever wanted to feel pretty?"

"No?"

Pete doesn't let him go. "It'll be fun, i promise."

It probably won't be, if past evidence is any indication.

Still, Pete tugs again, and Patrick lets him—and on the ambering end of a long day in summertime, he does the same thing, or something very like it.

Pete smells like sunscreen and chlorine and, in their hotel room, he throws himself onto Patrick's bed even though he has a perfectly good mattress all to himself just on the other side of the nightstand.

In what's left of the huge wings of sunlight, Patrick grumps at him, but doesn't fight all that much when Pete curls one arm around his waist. His smile, big and warm, against Patrick's shoulder.

Time shears the skin off an invisible heart.

He lets Pete drag him up the steps in his parents' house, watching the way the light still frizzes on his hair.

Oceanspray, he thinks. Sunsplashes in waterparks. Or that's how it looks in his head when Pete tells him about it in the summertime and the vents in the ceiling dispense cool air.

It's quiet upstairs, like the second floor is floating on an plane all its own. Pete steers Patrick to his childhood bedroom, and—speaking of things on a plane all their own.

Patrick fights off Pete's hold again, but stays where he is, just inside the door. Maybe there'd be nowhere to go if he left. Nothing back on the other side of the threshold. Pete flicks the light on and they are, the both of them, washed up on the shoal of adolescence, littered as it is with DIY posters for hardcore shows and star wars paraphernalia.

"Wait here," Pete instructs, and is gone almost as soon as he says it, leaving Patrick alone in this quiet, pocket dimension.

Pete came back here to live for a while, not that long ago. Patrick rubs at his own forearm.

There's nothing to do but sit on Pete's bed and wait.

Back in the bed that smells of sunscreen and poolwater, Patrick imagines all time as a jetstream, ribboning its way through his chest to Pete's to everyone else's, wherever everyone else might be. He imagines that, up close, he can tell that it's not really a stream, more like a current of silvered bubbles; that he can reach out and take one and in it find a moment unpeeled from all time.

The play of sunshine on the wall and the useless chiffon whisper of the curtains. Pete mumbles his happiness against Patrick's shoulder.

"I got—what's it called when you get rugburn, but on a slide? Slideburn?"

Pete sounds sun-sleepy, and content, and his arm is heavy around Patrick's waist. Patrick laughs.

"You're an idiot."

"No, it's gnarly, look."

All of a sudden, Pete sits up. The bed creaks, and he almost kicks Patrick, twisting around to show his leg. The burn runs in a pretty spectacular strip, starting somewhere under his swim trunks down to mid-calf. It makes Patrick's skin crawl, a little bit, but he bumps his knuckles against it and smirks when Pete yelps.

"Jesus, dude, it _still hurts_."

Patrick shrugs. "I know. You should put something on it."

Pete crowds to close again, hugging him tight. "You're a bitch, lunchbox."

"Maybe."

But he can feel Pete smiling against his shoulder again; he watches the gold sunshapes on the wall, and it's the dead of winter again, and it's nighttime, and the sun unfurls on someone else's horizon. Pete clamors back into the room, a fistful of…things…clutched in his hand.

Patrick snorts. "Those are all eye glitter?"

Pete crawls onto the bed, dispensing the different pencils on the bedside table. "No, I just took all her eyeliner."

Patrick supposes that he knew this about girls. He's only ever seen Pete wear one single black color, working the pencil down to a stub, but he suspects girls are different.

The mattress dips as Pete crawls closer, his fingers brushing Patrick's jaw. Patrick wrinkles his nose.

"Are you going to stab my eyes?"

"No, I like your eyes. Sit still."

Pete brandishes a _blue_ fucking pencil, and the bed dips when he leans close on his knees, and Patrick flinches away.

"Patrick!"

"Pete, they're my _eyes_."

"Dude, I do this all the time—"

"—on yourself—"

"—it's easier on someone else."

Patrick leans away, still. "If you blind me, you have to give me yours."

Pete's grin is so big it almost puts Patrick at ease.

"Deal."

As if to prove he's taking care, he slips off the bed and steps in close, on even footing on the carpet. Like this, Patrick can feel the soft, easy rhythm to his breath. He spreads his free hand open against Patrick's cheek and it's warm, and steady, and unflinching.

A slow, red tide turns over in Patrick's chest.

"I'm going to look stupid."

"You never look stupid, Trick. You're the cutest kid on the block."

This is profoundly untrue, and Patrick doesn't know why Pete thinks differently, or why it matters that he does.

In the summertime, Pete tells him all about the waterpark, high on some rush that makes Patrick feel strange to think about. Right here, his thumb presses gently at the skin under Patrick's eye.

The pencil makes him twitch again.

"Oh my god, just hold still."

"I can't help it!"

He can't, really, but he can't bring himself to pull away either. It's a stupid way to feel, probably.

"I'm not gonna hurt you, I promise."

"You say that all the time."

"And it's true _most_ of the time."

"Reassuring."

"C'mon, I promise."

"Fine."

He leans close again, and a moment passes in which Patrick's breath catches like a hook on the inside of his sternum. Pete smells faintly of whatever champagne they were all sharing downstairs; he gathers his bottom lip between his teeth, lost again to concentration.

With his legs caught between Pete and the side of the bed, Patrick couldn't go anywhere, even if he wanted to.

It's a weird thing to do, all of this—not something he'd do with any of his other friends. He's pretty sure it's not something he's _supposed_ to do with any friends. It's for girls, or the sort of thing girls do at sleepovers, probably, but the slow way Pete breathes makes it feel like it doesn't really matter. He listens for the glassy sounds coiling up from the living room, and he thinks of how certain times of day have that same sound. The disappearing of a summer afternoon going from gold to purpled gloom, or the violet thinness in dusk, just as stars appear, or winter, in the dead of night, when snow spirals out of the dark. He watches Pete and tries to hold still.

It's over faster than he thought it would be, even though he still twitches now and then.

Pete straightens up, smiling big, and all of a sudden he feels very far away.

"You're the prettiest."

"Fuck off."

Pete crawls back onto the bed to tug him into a hugely uncomfortable bear hug. "Never ever."

Patrick elbows him, but not as hard as he could. Pete doesn't let go anyway. Like this, Patrick can count off the meter of his heartbeat. His neck itches.

"There's like. A whole party happening downstairs, you know."

"Yeah, but you're my party."

And maybe that one really _is_ true, but only sometimes. Patrick's stomach twists over itself. He elbows Pete again and wriggles free. Pete falls back against the bed, watching him with big, happy eyes.

It seems weird, or somehow wrong, to ask _now let me do yours_ , so Patrick doesn't. He wouldn't really know how, anyway. He slips off the bed.

"I'm going to see what you did to me."

At his back, Pete calls: "Only good things!"

Patrick was right, for the record—it does look stupid. Or bizarre, at least. Like the person looking back at him in the bathroom mirror got his face painted, but not all the way. The blue glows garish all around his eyes.

Downstairs, happy laughter.

A soft heat pinches down his neck.

The liner, he discovers, doesn't really come off with soap and water. It just smears around and makes him wince when he gets some of the soap in his eye. He's groping around for a hand-towel when he hears Pete in the doorway.

"You have to use the remover."

If Patrick could see, he'd kick him. Probably in the shin.

Pete steps past him to reach for a little bottle in the mess of Hillary's spilled makeup case. Patrick grabs it from him.

"You didn't like it?" Pete teases.

Patrick does kick him, now, at the ankle.

"No, it's weird—" the remover or whatever it is feels slippery on his fingers and his eyelids. "Dude what the hell, why doesn't this just wash off?"

"It's waterproof."

" _Why_?"

"I dunno, so girls can cry without messing it up. Or go swimming, I guess."

Why anyone would put eyeliner on _before_ going swimming is beyond Patrick.

He splashes more water on his face. High up in the sky in the summertime, Pete sits on the edge of a bathtub, smearing ointment on his friction burn, and drunk on a feeling Patrick doesn't understand.

Over the rush of the faucet: the voices downstairs, counting off the fifteen seconds til midnight. They're at eight by the time he straightens up. The blue's all gone this time. Now his eyes just look raw at the corners, like he hasn't slept enough. He reaches for the towel again.

In the cottoned dark, Pete's arms hug tight around his waist. Patrick almost drops the towel.

"Five," Pete mumbles, catching on with what's left of the countdown.

His nose brushes the fine hairs at the back of Patrick's neck, and then there's four seconds, and then three, and then two, and then one. Somewhere that Patrick can't see, a crystalline globe drops and bursts into sparks. Downstairs people toast and cheer their way into 2006.

Pete slurs a kiss to Patrick's neck.

"Happy New Year, Trick."

A strange, sad feeling leadens Patrick's stomach. Maybe he's supposed to say something back.

But Pete's gone as quickly as he came, going for the door again.

"C'mon," he calls over his shoulder. "We have to toast."

Patrick looks down at the towel, his whole face hot.

In the mirror, he just looks normal again, like nothing ever happened, except for maybe where he rubbed his eyes too much. He folds the hand towel once over itself and lays it on the counter. His shoes make sticky little sounds on the floor as he moves to follow Pete downstairs.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Passion, Patience, Pati](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16287221) by [dapatty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dapatty/pseuds/dapatty)




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